EMC announced Unity, its brand new midrange product line at EMC World this week. The Unity evolution story is fascinating and you can read more about it here. The new product line includes the UnityVSA- a software only subscription based offering that complements the Unity hardware platform. In this post I dive deeper into the benefits provided by this new solution in the exciting software defined world.

ProductCamp Boston hosted its annual conference last weekend – this year’s event had more than 500 'Product People', making it the largest ProductCamp in the world. For me, the most fascinating observation was how Product Managers across all kinds of organizations- enterprise or consumer oriented, small or large, and catering to very different customer segments face a very similar set of daily challenges and can use similar tools to deal with these. The conference had over 80 sessions catering to different facets of Product Management. Having had the opportunity to attend five sessions through the day, I wanted to share some gems I got to hear:

​Imagine the following very regular situation- after a great Saturday night out at his favorite country bar, Jim decides to call it a night and head back home. He steps out and sees a line of yellow cabs waiting. He ignores them and pulls out the Uber app on your IPhone. The app informs him that surge pricing is at 2x. This means his uber ride will be more expensive than hailing a regular cab.

Yet Jim ignores both the cost and additional waiting time and sticks to the Uber ride. Seems familiar? Irrational?

After my last post on VSAs I received a few notes/questions around expanding upon the benefits of VSAs over traditional arrays. I felt it will be beneficial to step back and discuss the big picture benefits of the Software Defined Storage (SDS) space in general. In this post I discuss the key attributes that are making SDS so popular.

Depending on their value proposition and play, storage vendors have different SDS definitions. For the purposes of this post I will focus on SDS solutions that completely decouple storage software from the underlying hardware. Essentially these solutions abstract the control path out of a storage solution and offer this software intelligence as a consumable service.

One of the hottest trends in the storage industry recently has been that of the Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). Depending on who your favorite market research firm is, the CAGR for VSAs is projected to be between 25 to 48% over the next five years. What is a virtual storage appliance? Surely this doesn’t mean that all your data goes virtual too? Where is the data actually stored? In this post I’ll aim to address these questions and simplify this new emerging trend. Understanding VSAs can be simplified using a quick history lesson. Back in the day (and by this I mean really back in the day about 25 years ago) storage systems were mostly dumb machines. They were simply connected to controllers that governed all functionality. This changed when EMC introduced the Symmetrix product line in the 1990’s. Symmetrix was the first product to shift intelligence on to the actual storage system. Over time these storage arrays kept getting more and more intelligent and today have software capabilities that would only sound fictional 20 years back. Storage arrays today come built in with critical software intelligence such as local and remote replication, optimized I/O processing, cache management, resource allocation, etc. However as these storage arrays got more intelligent they also got costlier. Today depending on capacity and performance needs, a storage array can cost anywhere between $25K to $200K.

﻿Keeping up with technology can be an impossible task. It only feels like a few months ago when we were all still trying to figure out what exactly the cloud was. For those still living under a cloud (for lack of a better word), cloud computing refers to the ability to access you data from anywhere. Your information is stored by cloud providers (such as Amazon and Google) inside their own physical infrastructure instead of on your devices (such as hard disks) as done previously. Cloud host interfaces then allow you to connect any device to their storage and hence provide ubiquitous access. But just as we were getting comfortable with this, enterprises and startups everywhere have started promoting the hybrid cloud. So what exactly is this hybrid cloud!?